During September we negotiated with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre to assist in digitising their reel-to-reel tape collection. We now have 70 of their tapes in the queue, representing work done in Malakula and in Efate since the 1960s.

Zygmunt Frajzyngier deposited his collection of various African language recordings and they will be accessioned in the near future.

Hidden treasure in the collection

In this item, Tom Dutton is talking with Ken Pike who first coined the notion of ‘etic’ and ’emic’ analysis and who was the first President of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). This recording was made in 1962 about working with Australian languages. You can hear it here (once you are signed in to the catalog).

General news

Yvonne Treis has updated a large number of items in the collection for the Kambaata language from Ethiopia (YT1). This is a closed collection that can only be accessed with permission from the depositor.

Colleen Hattersley has embarked on a project to digitise and supplement the 1939 Roro-French dictionary by Père Paulo Coluccia, MSC. Roro/Waima is an Austronesian language of the Central Province of Papua New Guinea. It is intended that the final formats will be available for community use by October 2018, with the materials being archived in the Maeaka Tohana Our Language collection (CH4) in PARADISEC as it is digitised.

35 Dalabon tapes have been digitised and most, if not all, will be included in the Dalabon Corpus to be created in PARADISEC. These recordings will be brought back to the Northern Territory for further transcription work, which will also be archived, further enriching the corpus. We will also digitise Nick Evans’ and Sarah Cutfield’s field notebooks.

Don Kulick has brought 84 audio cassette tapes and one video tape of his research in Gapun, PNG during the 1980s-90s. Recordings include some 126 hours of recorded speech in Tayap and Tok Pisin. We will begin digitising the tapes in the coming weeks.

We have completed the MA1 collection of 19 audio cassette recordings of stories in numerous languages/dialects from two language groups in the Morehead District, Western Province, PNG recorded by Mary Ayres during doctoral research conducted in 1979 – 1981. Languages in narratives and songs include Kómnzo (Wárá) (tci), Nambo (ncm), Nama (nmx), Kánchá (pep) and possibly Namat (nkm) and Wartha Thuntai (gnt). Audio files have been sent to the archive, along with images of the tape labels containing the researcher’s metadata.

We have completed the following additions to the John Harris (JH1) collection:

JH1-bible Kiwai translation, question and answer book (22 images)

JH1-hymns These are selected hymns in Kiwai (17 images)

JH1-vocabulary This is a handwritten dictionary of Kiwai words (27 images)

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About the Blog

Endangered Language and Cultures is a multi-authored blog about linguistics, language documentation, research technology, and generally everything to do with endangered languages and cultures. It is written by linguists and archivists from PARADISEC, and a whole slew of guest contributors.More...